December 12, 2019
Happy December! It’s the month when we are making lists and checking them twice. It’s also the time of year when it feels like every media outlet and book website is announcing their best of the year lists. On ReadingGroupGuides.com, we would like you and your book group to help us compile OUR “Best of 2019” list.
Editorial Content for The Family Upstairs
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Teaser
From the New York Times bestselling author of THEN SHE WAS GONE comes another page-turning look inside one family’s past as buried secrets threaten to come to light.
Promo
From the New York Times bestselling author of THEN SHE WAS GONE comes another page-turning look inside one family’s past as buried secrets threaten to come to light.
About the Book
From the New York Times bestselling author of THEN SHE WAS GONE comes another page-turning look inside one family’s past as buried secrets threaten to come to light.
Be careful who you let in.
Soon after her 25th birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am.
She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well --- and she is on a collision course to meet them.
Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy 10-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone.
In THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS, the master of “bone-chilling suspense” (People) brings us the can’t-look-away story of three entangled families living in a house with the darkest of secrets.
Editorial Content for Find Me
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Teaser
In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller CALL ME BY YOUR NAME revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.
Promo
In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller CALL ME BY YOUR NAME revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.
About the Book
In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller CALL ME BY YOUR NAME revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.
No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s haunting CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. First published in 2007, it was hailed as “a love letter, an invocation...an exceptionally beautiful book” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love.
In FIND ME, Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever.
Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.
Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. FIND ME brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.
Editorial Content for Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family
Teaser
Bestselling author Mitch Albom returns to nonfiction for the first time in more than a decade in this poignant memoir that celebrates Chika, a young Haitian orphan whose short life would forever change his heart.
Promo
Bestselling author Mitch Albom returns to nonfiction for the first time in more than a decade in this poignant memoir that celebrates Chika, a young Haitian orphan whose short life would forever change his heart.
About the Book
Bestselling author Mitch Albom returns to nonfiction for the first time in more than a decade in this poignant memoir that celebrates Chika, a young Haitian orphan whose short life would forever change his heart.
Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to the Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince.
With no children of their own, the 40-plus children who live, play and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. Chika’s arrival makes a quick impression. Brave and self-assured, even as a three-year-old, she delights the other kids and teachers. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says, “No one in Haiti can help you with.”
Mitch and Janine bring Chika to Detroit, hopeful that American medical care can soon return her to her homeland. Instead, Chika becomes a permanent part of their household, and their lives, as they embark on a two-year, around-the-world journey to find a cure. As Chika’s boundless optimism and humor teach Mitch the joys of caring for a child, he learns that a relationship built on love, no matter what blows it takes, can never be lost.
Told in hindsight, and through illuminating conversations with Chika herself, this is Albom at his most poignant and vulnerable. FINDING CHIKA is a celebration of a girl, her adoptive guardians, and the incredible bond they formed --- a devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family, regardless of how it is made.
Editorial Content for A Good Neighborhood (Audiobook)
Teaser
A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD asks big questions about life in America today as it explores the effects of class, race and heartrending love in a story that’s as provocative as it is powerful.
Promo
A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD asks big questions about life in America today as it explores the effects of class, race and heartrending love in a story that’s as provocative as it is powerful.
About the Book
In Oak Knoll, a verdant, tight-knit North Carolina neighborhood, professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is raising her bright and talented biracial son, Xavier, who’s headed to college in the fall. All is well until the Whitmans --- a family with new money and a secretly troubled teenage daughter --- raze the house and trees next door to build themselves a showplace.
With little in common except a property line, these two families quickly find themselves at odds: first, over an historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers.
A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD asks big questions about life in America today --- What does it mean to be a good neighbor? How do we live alongside each other when we don't see eye to eye? --- as it explores the effects of class, race and heartrending love in a story that’s as provocative as it is powerful.